Demo

Forward Deployed Engineer (Agentic Systems) — Founding

Prentis
York, NY Full Time
POSTED ON 8/16/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 2/10/2027

About Us

We’re a stealth-stage startup building enterprise-grade AI agent platforms that automate long-running, knowledge-intensive processes. Our focus is on systems that can:

  • Understand organizational context
  • Integrate with existing workflows and enterprise software
  • Maintain coherent state and knowledge across extended interactions
  • Operate reliably in production with measurable business outcomes

This is not chatbot tech — it’s the infrastructure layer for the next generation of enterprise software.


Position Overview

We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to deploy autonomous AI agents into real enterprise workflows. This is a ship-the-product-in-the-field role: you’ll work directly with customers to map messy processes, build and integrate agentic systems (tools planning memory), and own production reliability end-to-end.

We’re looking for someone with hands-on experience shipping agentic workflows (tools planning state/memory) and the engineering rigor to support them in production (evals observability).

Role & ResponsibilitiesCore Responsibilities

  • Own 0→1 enterprise deployments: discovery → prototype → production rollout → iterate until measurable ROI
  • Design and build agentic systems with tool calling, planning/execution loops, state/memory, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) controls
  • Implement reliability mechanisms: retries, timeouts, checkpointing, idempotency, and safe failure modes
  • Build enterprise integrations (e.g., Slack/Jira/Salesforce/ServiceNow/SQL/SharePoint/knowledge bases), including auth, permissions, and auditability
  • Create evaluation and monitoring systems: offline regression suites, dataset replay, and production quality/cost/latency dashboards
  • Debug real failures in production: non-determinism, flaky tools, prompt regressions, partial outages, and “agent got stuck” scenarios
  • Collaborate with the founding team to shape product roadmap, technical strategy, and deployment playbooks

Technical Problem Areas (Not Exhaustive)

  • Long-running agent workflows with persistent state and memory across sessions
  • Orchestration patterns for multi-step, multi-tool processes
  • Guardrails, verification, and human approval gates for high-stakes actions
  • Reliability observability (tracing, structured logs, prompt/tool versioning, replay)
  • Enterprise security requirements: access control, audit logs, compliance constraints
  • Evaluation and benchmarking of agent performance in real production environments
  • Required Qualifications
  • Proof you’ve shipped agentic systems: built and deployed at least one system that includes tool use planning state/memory reliability mechanisms (work or OSS)
  • Experience with evaluation of LLM/agent behavior (task suites, regression tests, acceptance metrics, quality thresholds)
  • Production engineering mindset: tracing/logging, incident-style debugging, rollout/rollback strategies, versioning prompts/tools
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python and/or TypeScript), API integrations, and systems thinking
  • Comfortable working directly with customers and owning outcomes end-to-end (Forward Deployed / customer-zero mentality)
  • Willingness to work onsite in Chatsworth, California


Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, DSPy) in real deployments
  • Workflow engines for long-running processes (e.g., Temporal/Cadence, Airflow/Dagster as applicable)
  • Built agent observability: OpenTelemetry-style traces, replay pipelines, prompt/version registries, cost/latency instrumentation
  • Experience with enterprise software integration patterns and security/compliance constraints (PII, access control, auditability)
  • Familiarity with fine-tuning and adaptation methods (RAG, routing, lightweight fine-tunes, tool augmentation)


Who You Are

  • You love deploying real systems into messy environments and iterating fast
  • You think in systems: failure modes, tradeoffs, correctness, reliability, scalability
  • You’re pragmatic and execution-oriented, but you care deeply about engineering quality
  • You’re excited about the limits of agents and motivated to push them responsibly in production
  • You can communicate clearly with both technical teams and enterprise stakeholders


What We Offer

  • Competitive compensation meaningful equity, aligned with early-stage risk/reward
  • Direct access to the founding team and high ownership from day one
  • Resources to ship: strong engineering support and the compute/tools needed to deploy real agentic systems
  • A high-velocity environment where you’ll help define the product, the architecture, and the deployment playbook
  • Benefits and perks will be finalized as we scale, and we’ll share specifics during the process


Culture & Environment

  • Direct access to the founding team and fast, collaborative decision-making
  • Opportunity to shape product direction and deployment strategy from day one
  • Fast-paced environment with high ownership and high impact


Location

  • Onsite in Manhattan, New York with core collaboration hours expected. We believe proximity matters for early-stage execution, especially while defining architecture, product, and deployment playbooks.


Application Process

Submit the following using this google form link:

https://forms.gle/xUtwdpAFjuz26zBS8

  • Resume highlighting relevant experience with AI/ML systems and any architectural or design work
  • Brief cover letter (1-2 paragraphs) explaining your interest in agentic AI, what specific problems excite you, and your approach to systems design
  • Link to portfolio, GitHub, or relevant work samples (optional but strongly encouraged)

For recent grads: thesis abstract, system design projects, or significant architectural work if applicable


Equal Opportunity

  • We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and are dedicated to fostering an equitable workplace.

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